The term I have selected to fit in with my life experience is cognitive conservation. The textbook definition of this is: The tendency to seek and attend to information that conforms to an existing self-concept (Adler 59). This means basically that we don't always change the way we feel about ourselves even though there is evidence to prove otherwise.
I do not remember the exact date and time where this experience occurred, but I do remember the place; the second grade on the play ground at school. A couple of little girls in my class that I was not really friendly with came up to me and ask if I smoked. I knew what they where talking about because my mother smoked. I told them no, and asked why they asked that. They said because I smelled like smoke, and my teeth where stained. When they said this they both had looks of disgust on their faces. I had never really thought about it till that moment, and was so embarrassed. They turned and left me standing there on the playground. After a moment I went to the restroom and cried, because I had surmised in those few minutes that I was ugly, because of my teeth and that now people will always think I smoke. I decided that day that I was indeed ugly, and that I would never smoke. What the two little girls didn't know was hat I was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis when I was about eighteen months old, and that they had to give me such strong medicine to get rid of the pain and swelling in my joints, and that it was the cause of the stains. I didn't know this at the time either. I spent the rest of my childhood and adolescent years trying not to smile so people wouldn't see my teeth, and how ugly they where. Even in my senior year in high school when I went to take my senior pictures I still was trying not to smile. The photographer made me anyway, and I always hated those pictures. About a year after I graduated from high school I enter the Navy.
